African boy attacked by chimps recovers after New York surgery

STONY BROOK, N.Y., Feb. 1 (Reuters) - Just weeks after a
surgical team on New York's Long Island began a series of
operations to rebuild both lips of an 8-year-old boy mauled by
chimpanzees in Africa, the sound of success filled a play room
at Stony Brook Children's Hospital.

"Slurp!" was heard as Dunia Sibomana sipped a spoonful of
chicken broth through his newly created lips. The surgery has
already helped him keep food inside his mouth, speak more
clearly and stop constant drooling, said lead surgeon Dr.
Alexander Dagum, the hospital's chief of plastic and
reconstructive surgery.

Two years ago, Sibomana was playing with children in his
native Democratic Republic of Congo when chimpanzees attacked,
ripping off his lips and killing his younger brother.

The rare double-lip reconstruction requires several
surgeries over the course of about nine months, and the first
took place on Jan. 11.

Complications arose during the surgery, which was expected
to last eight hours but stretched to 14, as Dagum harvested a
rectangle of skin, nerve, tendon and vein from the child's
forearm and used it to form the circle of both lips.

It turned out the vein was too short to reach a crucial
blood supply in the neck so Dagum scrambled to collect a second
vein from the boy's upper arm to make the connection.

Racing against the clock to keep the transferred tissue
alive by surgically restoring the blood supply, Dagum looked
through a microscope and sewed vein to vein and nerve to nerve.

In the end, Dagum said he was surprised by the extent
Sibomana is now able to move his lips, which will improve
further as swelling subsides. A subsequent surgery this summer
also is meant to enhance the movement and look of the lips.

"We're really happy. We got more than we expected," Dagum
said.

After surgery, Sibomana remained sedated for a week as the
healing began. His hospital room is filled with stuffed animals
and balloons and manned 24 hours each day by volunteers from
Smile Rescue Fund for Kids, the charity that paid for his travel
to the hospital, which donated the medical treatment.

He woke surrounded by the American family he has been living
with - Jennifer Crean and her three children Collin, 16, Eian,
12, and Grace, 10, of the Long Island hamlet of Hauppauge.

Enough donations have poured into SmileRescueFund.org to
allow Sibomana to attend boarding school back in Africa, which
costs less than $700 a year, said charity founder Leon Klempner,
a retired Stony Brook dentist.

"Home - I need home! Ziggy!" said Sibomana, a native Swahili
speaker who is picking up English, calling out the name of the
Crean family dog as he waited to be discharged from the hospital
last week.

It will be another week before Sibomana is allowed to play
outside, Dagum said, but by then the snow from the blizzard that
crippled the U.S. Northeast on Jan. 23 may have melted away.

But hospital food director Michael West, who witnessed
Sibomana's excitement over seeing snow for the first time, said
he made sure the boy would not miss the fun of building snowmen
or having a snowball fight. As the blizzard raged on, West said,
he brought a bucket of the white stuff into Sibomana's hospital
room.

"I was soaking wet - he has a pretty good arm on him and he
has good aim," West said.
(Editing by Frank McGurty, Bernard Orr)